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The storied Japanese business philosophy of kaizen–roughly, “continuous improvement”–has been applied to HeatTech. From season to season, the improvements can be dramatic. The 2011 yarn has 88 threads, the 2012 just 64–”but it’s even warmer!” the worker says.

“We are not a fashion company,” Yanai likes to say. “We are a technology company.” He is so fond of this line, he repeats it during each of my three meetings with him. Finally, I ask him what kind of technology he’d like to see on Uniqlo’s shelves. He goes wide-eyed and blue-sky on me. “One-size-fits-all clothing,” he suggests, thinking of fabric that automatically adapts to the wearer’s contours. “Clothes that do not require any laundry. Just rinse it in water, shake it off, and all the dirt is gone.” He thinks a moment longer. “Or depending on your mood for the day, maybe fabric where the color may change.”

For the moment, Uniqlo’s key innovation is a proprietary heat-retaining synthetic material called HeatTech. “People once thought cotton underwear was the best,” Yanai says. “Synthetics were only good for mountain climbing or outdoor use, and they were not seen as comfortable.” Developed with Toray Industries, HeatTech begins its life in the western Japanese prefecture of Ishikawa, a lovely coastal plain ringed by snow-hatted mountains that is a longtime center for textile innovation. There, in a remarkably versatile factory that also produces carbon fiber for wind-turbine blades and Boeing Dreamliners, Toray makes the polyester-and-nylon yarn that eventually becomes HeatTech long johns, T-shirts, and socks.

A year later, the Association of Lebanese Industrialists threatened legal action to prevent Israel from selling hummus under the hummus name, which means chickpea in Arabic; the argument, in essence, was that as it goes for sparkling wine, where only bottles of a precise provenance qualify as Champagne, so it should for the tangy ­purée. By 2009, Lebanon and Israel had found a different way to settle their hummus differences: a competition to build the world’s single largest dish of the stuff. Israel whipped up an 8,993-pound batch, only to have Lebanon strike back with a decisive 23,042-pounder.

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